Heartbeat of Justice (Dec.

6 - 12)


Sunday, December 12
Third Sunday in Advent

Focus Theme
Heartbeat of Justice

Weekly Prayer
O God of Isaiah and John the Baptist, Elizabeth and Mary, through all such faithful ones
you proclaim the unfolding of future joy and renewed life. Strengthen our hearts to
believe your advent promise that one day we will walk in the holy way of Christ, where
sorrow and sighing will be no more and the journey of God's people will be joy. Amen.

Focus Scripture
Luke 1:47-55

And Mary said, "My soul magnies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for
he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all
generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and
holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He
has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their
hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he
has lled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his
servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our
ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

All Readings For This Sunday
Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146:5-10 or Luke 1:47-55
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11

Reection and Focus Questions
by Kate Huey

1. What would you sing in a Magnicat of your own?

2. How much do our Christmas carols resemble the Magnicat?

3. How does it make a difference that you listen for God's word in community rather
than alone?

4. How do you connect your "smaller" story with the "larger" story of God?

5. Where and when have you seen the promises of God brought to fulllment?

Advent is a time for prophets, like Jesus and John the Baptist, who came out of the
wilderness speaking of world-shaking events and exhorting us to turn our lives around
in preparation for what is to come. On this Third Sunday in Advent, we listen to another
kind of prophet, a simple maiden who comes not from the wilderness but from her own
village to visit her older cousin, Elizabeth. Mary and Elizabeth are women with voices
and something to say, or in Mary's case, something to sing. Women: we're denitely not
at "the top of the heap," here, especially not when there's an actual priest in the house,
Zechariah, an expert in matters of faith. Ironically, Zechariah is the one in this scene
without a voice, literally, since he's been struck speechless during his own angelic visit;
we have the rare opportunity to hear from the women for a change. And what a change
they dream of!

In their beautiful book, "The First Christmas," Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan
call Mary's song, The Magnicat, an "overture" to Luke's Gospel in which he sounds
important themes that will appear again and again. In Luke's Gospel, the emphasis on
women, the marginalized, and the Holy Spirit are all evident in the birth narratives,
including the one we read this week. Mary, lled with the Holy Spirit, gives voice to
those who are lowly, like the shepherds to whom the angels later announce the birth of
Jesus.

Advent is indeed a time of waiting and preparation, a time pregnant with hope. On this
Third Sunday of Advent, Mary and Elizabeth are two ordinary, pregnant women in the
most extraordinary time and circumstances, on the brink of greatness but rst tending to
their relationship with each other and with God. Motherhood is daunting to every
woman, especially the rst time around, and these two women have found themselves
pregnant under most unusual and unexpected terms: one past the age to conceive, and
the other a virgin. So, like women in every place and time, they spend time together,
keeping each other company, learning and praying and perhaps laughing together, as
they face rst-time childbirth and motherhood.

In this Advent season, we in the church are keenly aware that we wait in community for
the promises of God to unfold in our lives, too. Here, in community, we hold each other
up when one of us needs encouragement or support. We help one another search for
meaning, rejoice with one another, walk alongside each other. Just as Elizabeth must
have listened to Mary, and helped her prepare for what was to come (as much as such
a marvelous thing might be prepared for), we help one another work things out.
Sometimes, we just sit in the dark quiet and wait, together, trusting in the promises of
God, listening for a word from the Stillspeaking God. "In a way," Timothy Mulder writes,
"here is a preface for Emmanuel. We humans are not meant to go through the tough or
the wonderful alone. Both need to be shared." And in the midst of our waiting, as Paul,
writing from prison, encouraged the Philippians; as Hannah and Mary sang God's
praise; and as Elizabeth welcomed her beloved cousin and companion, we rejoice, our
hearts dancing within us. That is the way that we move with Mary's song.

Gorgeous Elizabeth

Would we say today that Elizabeth is a kind of mother-gure to Mary, or a spiritual
mentor? Mary seems to need both, and perhaps a protective gure as well. Barbara
Brown Taylor evokes Mary's plight, alone and disadvantaged in the system: "What she
does not have is a sonogram, or a husband, or an afdavit from the Holy Spirit that
says, 'The child really is mine. Now leave the poor girl alone.'" But the young girl doesn't
have to explain her situation to Elizabeth, or ask her questions in search of answers, or
even to ask for acceptance. When Mary sees her much older cousin, Taylor imagines,
she sees a "gorgeous" woman, "not gorgeous by ordinary standards, you understand,
but so full of life that it is hard to see much beyond her joy." Is it any surprise, then, that
in her relief and joy, Mary begins to sing?

Mary's song is music that comes from deep within her, perhaps, we would say today,
from her DNA. On that doorstep, she sings for Elizabeth and both of their babies, and
maybe for the bewildered priest in the background, watching the whole scene. This
young girl, inexperienced and sheltered, sings about God's blessings in her life, and of
God's vision of a world made right. Perhaps she gets carried away: "She is no longer
singing the song; the song is singing her," Taylor writes, "and what music, what verse!"
This teenager is "no politician, no revolutionary; she simply wants to sing a happy song,
but all of a sudden she has become an articulate radical, an astonished prophet singing
about a world in which the last have become rst and the rst, last." Mary's song, Taylor
writes, isn't just for Elizabeth but "for every son and daughter who thought God has
forgotten the promise to be with them forever, to love them forever, to give them fresh
and endless life."

A dangerous song

We linger for a moment on the meaning of Mary's song about God lling the hungry with
good things and sending the rich away empty. Scholars agree that this wasn't just a "My
God is stronger than your god" song. It wasn't a call to violent uprising or bloody
vengeance, either, then or now, even though, as John Ortberg observes, "New
Testament scholar Scott McKnight notes that in the 1980s, the government of
Guatemala banned this song" because, "[u]nlike 'Away in a Manger,' this prayer was
apparently considered subversive, politically dangerous. Authorities worried that it might
incite the oppressed people to riot." I remember hearing years ago that in the Latin
American base communities, the people got to read the Bible themselves and heard in
the Good News that God did not want their children to die of hunger and disease, or
their husbands and sons to be disappeared, or their daughters brutalized by poverty. All
sorts of "trouble" can start when the people get their hands on the Bible, it seems.
Maybe the governmental authorities of Guatemala were paying more attention than
most of us pay as we sing our hymns. What, for example, does it mean when we sing
this Christmas that the baby born this day "rules the world with truth and grace, and
makes the nations prove the glories of God's righteousness and wonders of God's
love"?

Let's compare, for example, "God's righteousness" with the way things were in Mary's
time. We can better understand the deep, desperate hope of this young girl if we look
more closely at her setting, in the time of Herod the Great. Again, Ortberg's reection is
very helpful, as he describes the burdensome taxes of Herod's reign, taxes that built the
temple and supported Herod's lifestyle but also cost the poor their land, concentrating
wealth at the very top and leaving the masses impoverished. Herod was so brutal and
unpopular that "[h]e knew people would party when he died, so he supposedly had 70
elite Jewish citizens imprisoned with orders that they be executed on the day of his
death so that there would be tears in Israel." Ortberg goes on to wonder with a religious
imagination of his own whether Jesus himself learned "his material"-about the poor
and the hungry and the meek being blessed-from his mother: "Did he learn from her
that God has no intention of tolerating the injustice and greed of this world on a
permanent basis?"

It's true that things aren't as they should be in our age, either, even without a Herod "the
Great." Even though there are proportionately many more people with enough (and
more than enough) to live comfortably than there were in Mary's time, the church is still
called to proclaim "God's challenge to good order," as Charles Campbell reminds us,
wherever that order requires or results in the suffering of the poor. As long as millions of
children go to bed hungry or homeless or afraid each night, there are tables to be
turned, that is, if we're going to mean what we sing in this year's Christmas carols.
Sharon Ringe describes the righting of things, when all of God's children will have what
they need: The rich and the hungry, the lowly and the powerful "represent economic and
political opposites, and as a result of God's action, they are said to move toward a
common middle ground." Ringe's claim for Mary's time is our dream, too, when "an
economy marked by scarcity and competition is replaced by an economy of generosity
in which all have enough."

Daring to sing the Magnicat

Wouldn't it be extraordinary if our Christmas dreaming led us to begin the new year with
a new vision for our economy, one of generosity and abundance? After all, Mary's song
is "not intended to raise violent resistance or to drive the wealthy and powerful to
despair," Stephen Cooper writes. Instead, "the well-off are exhorted to deal with their
wealth in a way that brings them into a positive relation with the poor in order to partake
in the same promised salvation." Even this kind of conversion would take considerable
courage. Richard Ascough asks, "I wonder whether we would dare to sing the
Magnicat today. What would it mean?"

We all long for a time when suffering will end and everyone will have enough, when
nations and families will live in peace, and the earth will be restored and healed of the
damage that has been done. This is a vision for the future, but we live in the present,
counting on the promises of God. Interesting: Mary had the nerve and the imagination to
claim such a future for herself and her people, but Barbara Brown Taylor says that "she
was singing about it ahead of time--not in the future tense but in the past, as if the
promise had already come true. Prophets almost never get their verb tenses straight,
because part of their gift is being able to see the world as God sees it--not divided into
things that are already over and things that have not happened yet, but as an eternally
unfolding mystery that surprises everyone." Are we capable of mixing up our tenses,
too?

As the world goes on ahead of us and celebrates Christmas, we are still in Advent,
learning from Mary, Fred Craddock says, to "stand expectantly at hope's window." Some
of us look back longingly on Christmases past, hoping to re-create better, more secure,
less troubled times. Many folks are grieving or depressed or lonely during the holiday
season, and the church's call is to tell the story once again, to comfort and inspire and
just be with those who need help in looking forward in hope. Michael S. Bennett writes,
"The development of hope within community takes time. How many Marys and
Elizabeths (or Zechariahs and Josephs) might there be sitting in the pews, awaiting an
opportunity to connect more deeply with the people around them? How many long to
connect their small story with the larger stories of God?"

In the season of Advent, we're anxious to start singing our beloved Christmas carols,
songs of joy and peace, music that's imprinted on our hearts and souls, just as Mary's
own song was part of who she was. First, though, we might linger for a while on Mary's
song of tables turned upside down, and feasts for the poor and hungry. In a world that
longs for a gentle peace, a generous sharing of the goods of the earth, a time of quiet
joy and healing, we stand by that window with Mary, expectant with hope, listening for
God's own heartbeat, a heartbeat of justice, compassion, and transformational love.

For further reection

Simone Weil, 20th century
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Meister Eckart, 14th century
We are all meant to be mothers of God.

Eleanor Roosevelt, 20th century
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Mother Teresa, 20th century
One lled with joy preaches without preaching.

Cheyenne saying
A people is never defeated until the hearts of the women are on the ground.

A preaching version of this commentary can be found on http://www.ucc.org/worship/
samuel/